Accolades for 'Kisses' - think cinematic version of a lean novella

Clocking in at a mere 75 minutes, "Kisses" tells the story of an 11-year old Irish boy and the girl next door who run away from home over the Christmas holidays to spend a wild night in Dublin.

There's not an ounce of filler in the movie, which played the Telluride, Toronto and London festivals before earning Lance Dalythe 2009 Independent Film and Television Alliance directing award. Daly deliberately pared the adventure to its absolute essence.

" 'Kisses' is about two kids and what they do over 24 hours," he says. "It's hard to scale a story down any more than that."

Daly, who shot on Super 16 film stock, says he aspired to make "something small and perfectly formed. The idea felt like a novella, a 'Mice and Men.' I wanted to take these tiny events, but film them in such a cinematic way as to give them a grand significance."

"Kisses" rides on the shoulders of its two young leads, Kelly O'Neilland Shane Curry. After auditioning thousands of Dublin primary-school pupils, Daly narrowed his choices to a shortlist of 15 boys and 15 girls.

"I thought it would be interesting to see who sits where, so I set up a soft, comfortable chair in the middle of the office and a hard chair by the door," Daly says. "Except for Kelly, all the girls, polite and nervous, sat on the wooden chair close to the door. Then Kelly came in, walked across the office and sat back in the soft chair. She owned the room. We all kind of leaned forward to her. I figured, if the audience leans forward like that, then we're on to something."

Kelly quickly made herself at home, Daly says. "Half an hour later, she's putting my face in the photo copier and sending out the boys to make her tea. They all ran around doing what she asked. Then she said to Shane, 'Get me a biscuit,' and he said, 'Get it yourself.' He was the only one tough enough to stand up to Kelly. That's when we realized these two were a perfect match."

YouTube to get its big-screen moment

Director Kevin Macdonaldsteered Forest Whitakerto an acting Oscar in "The Last King of Scotland" and tackled the Iraq war in "State of Play." Now, the British filmmaker is working with Ridley Scottto assemble a full-length documentary culled from videos submitted to YouTube.

The "Life in a Day" project will feature snippets of footage shot worldwide on July 24. The final cut will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Festival director John Coopersays, "I'm excited to see what people all over the world have to say about their lives right now. I have no idea what to expect. That's the fun of it."

Rubén Blades helps tell a New Mexico story

Filmmakers like to shoot in New Mexico because it can be made to look like so many other locations. Karen Koch, a former Hollywood production manager on such films as "Adaptation," "Cry Baby" and "Drugstore Cowboy," believes New Mexico has its own film-worthy heritage. When she moved back to her native New Mexico in 2006 to co-found the Luminaria production company, Koch says, "Unlike Hollywood, which comes here to make New Mexico look like other places, we were determined to tell some New Mexico stories."

Case in point: "Spoken Word." Directed by Victor Nunez("Ulee's Gold"), the movie stars Rubén Blades, who took a leave of absence from his former job as Panama's tourism minister to play an estranged father trying to make sense of his poet son (Kuno Becker). Based on the writings of Santa Fe-bred poet Joe Ray Sandoval, "Spoken Word" takes place largely in Chimayo, N.M. Koch says, "It's such an interesting town because there's a miracle church in Chimayo where people make pilgrimages from all over the world for the holy dirt. It's also the heroin capital of the Southwest. They're both in the same town. That creates a nice, edgy dynamic." {sbox}